"It’s embarrassing for a man to model"

October 2, 2011 | Written by Celia Walden

Striding across a Los Angeles hotel suite in a boyfriend blazer, skinny grey jeans and two-tone slingbacks, she tugs open the French windows, pops a Marlboro in her mouth and lights up. An awkward moment ensues when, during the course of our small talk (‘How are you enjoying LA? Do you have kids?’), I tell her that I’m pregnant. Jovovich stares, appalled, from her cigarette to my stomach, before engaging in a frenzy of stubbing and hand flapping. ‘My God – I’m so sorry. When I was six months I was out to here,’ she says stretching her arms open.

If the actress’s pregnancy weight did not make up such a large part of her cuttings (under the headline don’t worry, milla – eat! one columnist celebrated Jovovich’s five-stone gain as a milestone in Hollywood history), it would be tempting to put this down to hyperbole. In the 35-year-old’s case, it’s characteristic of what a friend describes as ‘her BS-free attitude’. Because Jovovich, it’s instantly clear, doesn’t possess the PR filter that turns even intriguing stars into platitude-spewing drones.

‘In Russia they make you do this weird binding thing around the stomach after you give birth,’ she runs on in her low voice. ‘But after I had Ever [her three-year old daughter] I said, “No way. I just went through labour: I’m chilling.”‘

She cocks her head to one side. ‘Of course, I regretted that later because it took my muscles ages to return to the way they were.’

With her figure now back to its original size eight, and that angular, sensual face staring out from beneath ferociously peaked brows, Jovovich exudes the sexy machismo of a 1920s film star. In her new film, The Three Musketeers – based on the Alexandre Dumas classic, directed by her husband, Paul W S Anderson – she plays an action-hero-style M’lady.

Jovovich, who started out as a model, made her name as an actress playing aliens and zombie-slayers in The Fifth Element and the Resident Evil series. From the relish with which she discusses the physicality of her scenes, one wonders whether action sequences have become a kind of addiction.

‘With The Three Musketeers I just loved the idea of these van Dyck-style ladies getting off their butts and swinging through the air doing martial arts,’ she says grinning.

Whether by accident or design, Jovovich has come to epitomise a kind of ludicrously far-fetched post-feminist ideal. Here is a working mother who looks like a supermodel, fights like a ninja and swears like a Geordie builder (throughout the interview she refers to her Newcastle-born husband as ‘my British b-d’). But there’s an impatient streak there, a nervous energy in her rushed speech and lightly shaking hands that may explain her erratic career trajectory. Because over the past two decades Jovovich has gone from modelling and acting to song-writing, clothes-designing (despite its critical success, her fashion label, Jovovich-Hawk, created with her fellow model Carmen Hawk, folded in 2008) – and back again.

‘The “model-turned-actress” thing was a big chip on my shoulder for years,’ she admits. ‘It was ridiculous how angry I would get. Now they call me an “ex-model”, which is, like…’ burying her face in her hands, she lets out a muffled moan. In fact, Jovovich – who has fronted campaigns for Chanel, Versace, Prada and Calvin Klein over the years – continues to get the covers and campaigns, and has remained a L’Oréal ‘spokesmodel’ for more than a decade.

‘The girls who endure past the age of 25 are fascinating because they brought something more to the table,’ she explains, with no attempt at self-deprecation. ‘Take the supermodels: sure they had mystique and the glamour, but those girls are smart businesswomen. Lots of pretty faces came and went over the years, but some stuck around and I happen to be one of them.’

Back then it was rare for an actress to grace the cover of a magazine – unheard of for one to front a handbag or clothing campaign. ‘Now, every client would rather work with an actress. After the supermodel thing, the clients just said, “We’re done with paying top dollar for girls with attitudes who are constantly late.”

‘These days they’ll pay them nothing so they don’t create stars – and I get that. Why have a model on the front of your magazine when you can have Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett or Hilary Swank? ‘Because those girls are intelligent and talented, people are interested.’

Jovovich gives today’s young models the same advice her mother gave her when she started out (albeit updated for modern technology): ‘Be interested in your business. Google the 10 top photographers in fashion and know who the top models were 20 or 30 years ago. ‘From childhood my mother had me examining Robert Mapplethorpe’s style and Egon Schiele’s framing – that’s what modelling is about.’

Jovovich was born in Kiev. Her father was a Serbian paediatrician, her mother an actress, Galina Loginova. She and her parents emigrated to America in search of a better life when she was five. That better life proved elusive, and they found themselves living above a friend’s garage in California, with her mother working as a cleaner. Channelling her ambitions through her daughter, Loginova enrolled her in ballet, tap, acting and piano lessons.

By the time she was 11, Jovovich had been shot for the cover of Condé Nast’s now-defunct Mademoiselle, making her the youngest model ever to appear on the front of a women’s magazine. A year later, chosen by the photographer Richard Avedon to participate in a series of provocative portraits celebrating Revlon’s Most Unforgettable Women in the World, Jovovich had embarked on a career that was not without controversy.

Aged 16 she quit the catwalk (albeit temporarily) ‘disillusioned’. ‘I was so snobby back then,’ she smiles. ‘And so superior. I felt that I was more than a pretty face, but at 16 what do you really have to give?’ Jovovich must have had something. After making her film debut on the Disney Channel’s The Night Train to Kathmandu (1988), she acted opposite Sherilyn Fenn in Two Moon Junction (1988), before getting her first film lead in Return to the Blue Lagoon (1991).A record deal with EMI and the release of her first album, The Divine Comedy, might have been too much success too soon. Bored with all-work-and-no-play the 16-year-old began to experiment with drugs, shoplifting and petty vandalism. ‘My poor mum had a lot of problems with me around that time. I was young but I’d been working for years, so if she asked me to clean my room I’d say, “You can’t tell me what to do after I’ve worked a 12-hour day.” ‘It gave me a power that no one that age should have.’

Jovovich claims she ‘never took fame personally – and I still don’t today. When people held up my picture to sign at a première it didn’t feel like it was because I was famous – just a part of the job. ‘Yet the surfeit of praise that ruins so many young stars can’t have been easy to shrug off. ‘Oh, that never happened,’ she assures me. ‘I would only ever get horrible things said about my acting and so on. And they were right: I was a horrible actress back then.’

After a turbulent year in which her parents’ fraught marriage finally dissolved and her father was imprisoned for health-insurance fraud, the 16-year-old eloped to Las Vegas with Shawn Andrews, her co-star on Dazed and Confused. The marriage was annulled two months later. A second marriage, in 1997 to the French director Luc Besson (who cast her as Leeloo in The Fifth Element and was 16 years her senior), was similarly short lived, ending in 1999.

Her father was released on appeal in the same year. Jovovich says that her father’s incarceration only brought them closer, but his ‘playboy ways’ put her off bad boys for good. ‘My dad was always the hot ticket,’ she shrugs, ‘so I’ve developed a real chip on my shoulder about men who think they’re all that with women.’

Perhaps for that reason, Jovovich says with a cackle, ‘I’ve tended to fall in love with the directors rather than the actors. That’s because of my mother, too, who told me actors were vain, self-centred, flighty.’

And what about that other actress favourite, male models?

‘Ugh,’ she shudders. ‘They’re even worse than actors. I mean seriously: you’re going to model for a living?’ I can’t help laughing: so it’s OK for a woman to model but not a man? ‘Yeah!’ she cries. ‘It’s embarrassing for a man to model. Because it’s not like their career can take them anywhere – except in rare exceptions, like my ex-boyfriend [the photographer] Mario Sorrenti.

‘If I ever had a boy, my one terror would be that he wanted to be an actor or a model.’

When Jovovich met Anderson on the set of Resident Evil in 2003, he was the polar opposite of everything she loathed: a working-class northerner ‘without the pretences of other men. A normal guy who happens to be extraordinary.’ She loves to visit his family in Newcastle, where the pair always stop to buy cheese-and-onion pasties at the Greggs bakery.

‘If we had a Greggs here it wouldn’t last a day, would it?’ she looks out wistfully over the high-rise hotels of Sunset Boulevard. ‘People would wander in asking for sashimi and it would all be over.’

It’s not just the city’s quasi-religious aversion to pastry and its inability to laugh at itself (‘I love Ricky Gervais, but you’re not allowed to laugh at the Golden Globes’) that bother her about Los Angeles. ‘I worry about Ever,’ she confides, leaning in. ‘She’s the daughter of two successful people living in Beverly Hills: that’s gross. And that’s why at some point I want to take her to live in a village in Mongolia where we can help milk the yaks.’

Jovovich would like to spend more time working on her music, yet 2012, she’s decided, ‘is going to be all about my daughter.

‘Not that I’m ever going to be just a mum,’ she cautions, defiant, ‘because it’s not in my nature, and what’s the point of being with your kid 24 hours a day if you’re depressed, which I would be?’

And if the parts start to dry up, she promises she won’t feel bitter. ‘Of course at some point you get relegated to the mum or ball-busting boss roles, but after 25 years and a lot of success, I don’t really care.’

Unlike the majority of beautiful women, who either question that one great blessing or chart its steady decline, Jovovich is pragmatic about ageing. ‘At 35 I like the way I look more than if I did something to myself and risked things going wrong.’ She tells me about a recent incident when a cosmetic dentist talked her into getting veneers after she chipped a tooth. Looking at herself in the mirror afterwards, she was devastated.

‘It didn’t even look like me. I couldn’t believe that I’d let them take away my smile. Luckily I found a dentist who recreated my teeth the way they were, but it taught me a lesson. Until you can’t bear to look in the mirror without feeling uncomfortable, don’t touch yourself.

‘What is it you people say? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” Because you will break it.’

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